I recommend Cyberpunk, then. It’s got all that kind of stuff. The hype was MASSIVE, but ignore all that and just play. It didn’t meet the hype at release, but is is excellent and fun.
I played the unpatched, unfixed version on PC and got to the end. It was glitchy. I heard it is almost entirely fixed now and has a better leveling system and stuff.
Great game. Was released a year before being fully done.
I will say that while Cyberpunk had a big city/area to drive around and explore and tons of side missions to do in them, it doesn’t have the sort of extracurricular activities of a GTAV. You won’t be playing tennis or doing yoga or chasing clowns or other stuff completely unrelated to being a cyberpunk mercenary. That’s kind of a plus in my book but I know some people laud those activities from GTAV.
Cyberpunk is also an RPG. You spend a lot of time in lengthy conversations with NPCs, especially Keanu Reeves’ character, where you’re making regular dialogue choices that materially effect events in the game and what ending you get. The writing and voice acting is the best I’ve ever seen in a video game, too. I can’t think of too many other games where I was as invested in my character as a person, instead of just my avatar - which is particularly amazing for a game where you’re not playing a pre-written character.
If you were a fan of the table top RPG from the '80s, the game is fully lore compliant, and was written with lots of input from Mike Pondsmith, the author of the original game. If you’re not, don’t worry - you don’t need any of that to understand the game.
Minor disagreement. The vast majority of the quests are various merc for hire assignments, and the main storyline as well. But there are more than a few sub quests and gigs that are in just plain weird, or even philosophical bent. Now, some of them were added later in the development cycle (I’m thinking of the VR elemental journey with the monk, or the Edgerunner Anime “historical document”), but there’s more than just combat.
And there’s the entire armed road-racing questline (pretty good) and later ongoing road race options for lovers of the main GTA play. True, I’d agree that things feel (to the better) a big to carefully scripted sometimes, but a lot of the subquest stories, and the ways to complete them are pretty unique.
I didn’t mean to imply that it’s just combat. I meant it was stuff that you’d expect a somewhat shady cyberware-enhanced person with a gun for hire to be involved in. Be it theft, espionage/info gathering, infiltration, etc. Just not yoga or golf.
Thanks, folks; purchased!
Cyberpunk has you doing some extracurricular stuff, but it doesn’t turn it into a minigame the way GTA tends to. For example, if you’re doing the Judy Alvarez romance storyline, there’s a mission to go scuba diving with her. You click through a dialogue tree, do a short swimming level, then another dialogue tree. If you picked the right dialogue choices, you unlock the next mission in the romance quest line. In GTA, there’d be a whole scuba diving mini-game, and you’d have to repeat it periodically, or your relationship deteriorates.
I don’t think the game would benefit from that minigame model, but I would like it if the city were more interactive. Stuff like being able to sit at a noodle kiosk and eat something. Maybe tie it into a sustenance meter or something. Or some more variety in stuff you can do with romance partners after you’ve finished their storylines. The public transit system they added in one of the later patches was a step in this direction. It was cool being able to just ride the train around the city, even if I usually used quicker fast travel options when I was doing missions.
There’s a mod for that!
I wish CP2077 had a quarter of the mods Skyrim or F4 have, especially game extenders though.
And yeah, I do really appreciate the ability to call your romance partner over to have a date at one of your (many) apartments, and it has a few conversation options (mostly tied into Phantom liberty and the romance quests) but it’s a bit threadbare. Of course, most games didn’t give you even that much as a free patch, so I’ll keep my complaints to a minimum.
Anyway, for all my complaints, I’d say CP2077 is very story rich, workably stable (in it’s current form) and has done a very good job of balancing cyberware vs capacity and making it’s skill/stat/perk system feel involved. There are still clear “best” or at least, easiest options, but you can have fun with almost all of them.
The expanded perk and leveling system is really good, and has a lot of options for different play styles, but (and this isn’t really a criticism of the game, so much as myself) it suffers from what I call Skyrim Carcinization - the tendency of all character builds to eventually become a stealth sniper.
I really need to get around to playing CP2077, it’s one of those “bought it on sale sometime but haven’t gotten around to playing it yet” games, but sounds like one I’d enjoy (after all the patching and fixing, at least).
As for the stealth sniper thing, well, I played Skyrim for years as one without realizing it was the “meta” build just because that’s the natural direction I tend to go if the game allows it. I was just glad that unlike Oblivion archery was actually effective.
Huh. The first time I played that game, apparently I was on the Judy Alvarez romance storyline, and I did the scuba-diving mission, and we had sex, but the relationship almost instantly deteriorated for reasons I do not recall precisely (but definitely had to do with my character, deep down in her heart, being stone colder than ice); she could not deal with it and left town for good, never to be seen or heard from again. It was all very cyberpunk.
I tried CP2077 for a few hours at launch but couldn’t really get into it… the world felt so empty and dead, and the quests were super generic kill X, fetch Y, types of deals punctuated by long monologues that didn’t really say much.
I was hoping for a more Deus Ex-like experience where you had the freedom to problem-solve in various ways, but this game felt like it was on rails much of the time.
Has it gotten better with the patches? Should I give it another go, and if so, is it better to start all over or just keep going from my old saved game?
Maybe not chasing, but boxing a clown with a grenade in place of a nose…
Absolutely get the Phantom Liberty DLC. Superb new characters, and a gut-wrenching no-good-choices decision at the end.
It is certainly meant to be that way. For example, sometimes you can talk your way out of certain situations. Or, assuming you are to, for example, shanghai something or someone for money, you could try blasting your way through the front door… or you could go around the back, hack a window open, and slip in and out before anyone is the wiser. And maybe you have a choice in the final disposition of said data or person…
The first hour of so is pretty scripted, but once you finish the Arasaka heist it becomes much more open world. Up to that point, you’re basically still in the tutorial.
Most missions have multiple ways of approaching them - level design supports stealth builds really well, there’s often a diplomatic option, and there’s lots of viable combat builds for the direct approach. The game also avoids cookie-cutter mission design, where there’s ten quests that are all “five guards and a briefcase on a street corner.” Each mission is unique, and usually has a fair amount of story behind it.
It is a really talky game, though. I think the writing mostly pays off - I found the characters to be well written and engaging, at least on par with your better class of science fiction novel.
Getting spoilery:
Pretty much all the endings are like that. I think the only one where you’re still in a relationship by the end of the credits is the one where you run away with the Aledcados to find a cure, and that one takes a lot of optimism to see a long-term future in.
I have had almost zero issues with controller stuff since unlocking frame rate. I do get some audio glitching if I don’t restart the game once every two hours or so.
Otherwise, looks great and plays great. I sense no slowdown even in insane combat intensity.
Just fought a boss that I think marks about 75-80% through the game. Tough, but did it.
This is a very admirable FPS single-player campaign. Very well done.
I played CP2077 three times over the past two days, having to stop in the first couple due to motion sickness. 32 inch monitor, PC, normal desktop viewing distance (perhaps slightly more distance due to the monitor size and my relaxed game-playing posture).
I had already bumped field of view to the max straightaway, but no bueno. I then found a great Reddit post on tweaks that helped, and last night I went through the combat tutorial with no sickness issues.
But…those combat tutorials were in very controlled conditions with few shaky cam cinematics. We shall see how it shakes out in actual street situations.
I remember trying Bioshock Infinite on the toughest difficulty (“1999 Mode”) and I had to give up during the big airship fight. Brutal!
I’m not a huge fan of battling while gliding on the rails.